U.N. teams sound satisfied with first day's work

CHARLES J. HANLEYAP Special Correspondent

Published Thursday, November 28, 2002

AL-AMIRIYAH, Iraq -- Digging into Iraqi computers, surveying scenes with detectives' eyes, U.N. specialists finally got down to the business of weapons inspection Wednesday at the start of a demanding, months-long job that could make or break peace in the Mideast.

The Iraqi side also sounded a businesslike note. "We opened doors and submitted to inspection openly," said Ali Jassam Hussein, director of the missile site 25 miles southwest of Baghdad along the Euphrates River.

The U.N. teams did not immediately disclose any significant new findings from their surprise inspections, and may never do so. In the volatile atmosphere surrounding Iraq, the inspectors are expected to leave it to their New York and Vienna agency chiefs to reveal serious problems in the campaign to strip Iraq of any capability in chemical, biological or nuclear weapons.

Those tensions sharpened on the inspectors' first working day Wednesday when an air-raid siren wailed in Baghdad, and Iraqi officials said a "hostile flight" had flown over the capital. The U.S. military, whose warplanes have routinely patrolled Iraqi airspace since the 1991 Gulf War, had no comment.

The United States has warned it will disarm Iraq by force if the inspections fail, with or without international help. Most other governments say only the U.N. Security Council can authorize such a move.

The U.N. teams will continue their field missions -- difficult, detailed inspections of hundreds of sites -- every day. They've resumed under a Security Council mandate after a four-year break, to assess whether Baghdad is still making to chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.

In New York, Norway's U.N. Ambassador Ole Peter Kolby, who chairs the Security Council committee monitoring sanctions against Iraq, said it appeared the first day's inspections went well.

"I think that was very positive," he said. "It looks to me as so far so good -- that they carried out inspections. That's what we all hoped for. Soon there will be more inspectors, and then they will carry on and we'll see."

Syria's deputy U.N. ambassador Fayssal Mekdad, whose country is the only Arab nation on the 15-member council, also was upbeat.

"As we have always expected, the Iraqis have given all support, all cooperation, and we hope this will continue and the voices of war will go down in comparison with the very, very positive inspection that is going on now," Mekdad said.

Hans Blix, the chief weapons inspector, concurred that Wednesday's initial inspections went well. But he told CNN in an interview that it was up to Iraq to show it has no weapons of mass destruction.

"We maintain that the burden of proof is on Iraq," Blix said. "They object and say that anyone who is arraigned before a tribunal is acquitted if the prosecutor cannot prove the case.

"We say you are not in a criminal tribunal; you are in a situation where you want to create confidence that Iraq doesn't have any anthrax or anything else that's not prohibited. That takes more than there's no evidence of it."

In one of Wednesday's three inspections, six white U.N. vehicles led journalists on a circuitous route to confuse Iraqi officials about their destination. The trip ended here among riverside wheat fields, outside the gates of a military-run graphite plant.

They gained immediate entrance, but most soon left and drove around back, to another sprawling compound -- the al-Rafah testing station, where the Iraqis have long tried out engines for missiles, on skeletal steel structures called test stands.